Jonathan Cain: Steve Perry Pretty Much Said ‘Lose My Number’

Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain revealed that he's had almost no direct contact with Steve Perry since the former singer “pretty much said, ‘Lose my number.’”

Even though he was complimentary toward Perry’s comeback album Traces, and noted that he wrote positively about the singer in his book, Cain said he's accepted the position and it was Perry’s “loss” if he didn’t want to keep in touch.

He added that Perry refused to talk about Cain’s book when interviewers brought it up. “That’s his loss – whatever," he said. "I don’t live like that. Your decisions and your relationships are what you make them. If he chooses not to have one with myself or Neal, that’s not my wish. But I’m understanding of his space, and I’ll leave it at that. To me, Journey just sold a million tickets on this last tour – our most successful one ever with Arnel [Pineda] – and I choose to be grateful for that.”

Responding to the speculation that Perry wanted to avoid re-connection “because he’s afraid of something happening,” Cain said, “I can’t even go there. You’d have to ask him. I remember when we decided to move on without him. Steve pretty much said, in so many words, ‘Lose my number.’ I don’t have Steve’s number and I don’t talk to him. If he needs something, the publisher reaches out to us.”

He described Perry as having always been “very cooperative” when it came to making decisions over the band’s business dealings. “I’m usually in complete agreement with anything he says,” Cain explained. “He has his life and we have our band and we move on. I can’t really control that situation. It’s what we make of it and that’s where we’re at.”

Perry ruled out a reunion with Journey on a number of occasions last year. “You can still love someone, but not want to work with them," he said. "And if they only love you because they want to work with you, that doesn’t feel good to me.” He noted that he didn’t “really care to read Jonathan’s book,” describing the memoir as “none of my business.”